LibreOffice ready for business

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 2 Aug 2011 at 10:32

LibreOffice has unveiled its latest version, saying it's ready to be rolled out by enterprises.

LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, spun out after the latter was bought as part of Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems last year. While Oracle has since released OpenOffice to the open-source world, LibreOffice has already won support from RedHat, Novell and Canonical, which has started shipping its Ubuntu OS with the productivity suite.

The latest version of the open-source software, LibreOffice 3.4.2, fixes the "majority of the most important bugs", according to The Document Foundation (TDF), which organises the project.

LibreOffice is now stable enough to "be deployed for production needs by most enterprises", TDF added.

"TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we are right on track to achieve this objective," said Bjoern Michaelsen, developer and member of the Engineering Steering Committee.

"Of course, with such a large code renovation effort, we are aware of the short-term risk of reduced stability, but this is counterbalanced by the long-term improvement in features, speed and - again - stability."

TDF warned large organisations to get help deploying LibreOffice from a support partner, to help identify specific problems and as a way to "contribute financially" to the open-source project.

The latest version involved 300 contributors, who changed five million lines of code. The LibreOffice development community is made up of independent volunteers as well as corporate support from Oracle, SUSE, RedHat and Canonical.

The latest version of LibreOffice can be downloaded here.